Altered motion repulsion in Alzheimer's disease

Recent research in Alzheimer's disease (AD) indicates that perceptual impairments may occur before the onset of cognitive declines, and can thus serve as an early noninvasive indicator for AD. In this study, we focused on visual motion processing and explored whether AD induces changes in the properties of direction repulsion between two competing motions. We used random dot kinematograms (RDKs) and measured the magnitudes of direction repulsion between two overlapping RDKs moving different directions in three groups of participants: an AD group, an age-matched old control group, and a young control group. We showed that motion direction repulsion was significantly weaker in AD patients as comparing to both healthy controls. More importantly, we found that the magnitude of motion repulsion was predictive of the assessment of clinical severity in the AD group. Our results implicate that AD pathology is associated with altered neural functions in visual cortical areas and that motion repulsion deficit is a behavioral biomarker for the tracking of AD development.